Cary_perdiemcommand

This is a command and support script to do simple per diem requests via email, to get US government per diem data in a simple query format.

The motivation behind this is that the data is publicly available but only easily queriable via the http interface at http://www.defensetravel.dod.mil/site/perdiem.cfm ; it seemed like a useful thing to make it available via an email gateway with "fuzzy matching" as a test project.

Note: the cary_perdiemcommand package is intended as an example project with no affiliation with the US government, and its use is not condoned or endorsed by the US DOD. It is only presented here as an example of how to use various elements of Python.

Requirements

Cary_perdiemcommand makes use of jinja2, tinydb, pyquery, and fuzzywuzzy with python-Levenshtein.

Configuration

In your Cary local_conf.py file, please include configuration similar to the following (omitting TEMPLATE_PATH uses the default templates included in the module):

PERDIEM_CONFIG=dict(
    LOCSTRING_FILENAME="/path/to/locstrings.csv",
    DB_FILENAME="/path/to/perdiem.json",
    TEMPLATE_PATH="/path/to/perdiem/templates"
	)
	...
from cary_perdiemcommand import PerDiemCommand
COMMANDS.update({
    "perdiem": (PerDiemCommand, PERDIEM_CONFIG),
}

The locstrings.csv and perdiem.json files can be generated by the perdiem_scraper class which can download them from the perdiem website. The templates plaintext_template.txt and html_template.html are jinja2 templates which are placed in the configured directory (one typical configuration is to have a plugin_data directory with subdirectories for each plugin, such as plugin_data/perdiem, etc).

Command

The first line of the email body should be a "city, country" or "city, state, country" such as "Brugges, Belgium" or "Baltimore, MD, USA" (US cities should include state and country).

Command-line tool

You can execute the module from the shell command line in order to rebuild the database or do a manual query. Use python -m cary_perdiemcommand; you will have to either pass locations for the files manually or use an existing settings file. For example, to rebuild the database using a local.conf file for the file locations, use

python -m cary_perdiemcommand --settings=/path/to/local_conf.py rebuild